Forrester Research 2015 Predictions: The gap between customer-obsessed brands and the rest will grow wider and a new data-fuelled, software-powered, and context-focused strategy will begin to reshape marketing in 2015.
Every telco marketer knows that it’s time for a new, customer-focused marketing strategy – or to use Forrester Research’s words from the above prediction, one that is customer-obsessed. And if you’re like most telcos, the concept of adopting this kind of business model is not a new concept – you know that customers are demanding it but you’ve been struggling on how to deliver it.
So what is the key to this new kind of strategy? Simply put, it’s personalization. And this is the year that you must master it, or as Forrester suggests, without real-time, context aware personalization in all channels, you may lose out to competitors.
This report, Delivering New Levels of Personalization in Consumer Engagement, discusses the importance of email, mobile-optimized websites, mobile apps, and social media as key interaction channels. The report also notes that complex, real-time decision engines are making personalized offers in these channels more and more viable and this is especially true in the telco industry.
Creating the personalized experience customers want
Real-time decision engines, which are fueled by Big Data and analytics tools, will drive the data-fuelled, software-powered, and context-focused strategy that will be key to your success in 2015. With this kind of technology, you will be able to personalize initiatives in ways you’ve never been able to before. And you can use customer-specified preferences and past interaction history – and even sentiment data, such as emotional states, social media sentiment, and context – to create the kind of campaigns consumers expect today.
As noted in the Forrester report, delivering these kinds of personalized experiences can drive revenue through increased size of transactions and extended lifetime values of customers. Campaigns like these can also increase customer retention rates and improve conversion rates.
Taking the first steps towards customer-obsessed personalization
The Forrester report discusses some of the most important ways marketers plan on increasing personalization in the next couple of years. Here are highlights of a few of them and how you can incorporate them into your 2015 “customer-obsessed” marketing plans.
• Adopt real-time data analytics that can identify subscribers no matter what channel (retail store, online, mobile, or web) they use. This will enable you to deliver personalized content to subscribers’ preferred channels and thereby increase interaction.
• Create a single view of customers with contextually sensitive personalization data and past interaction history. You can then deliver campaigns that are based on customer-specific preferences, subscription plans and services that are tailored to their likes and usage patterns.
• Use real-time consumer profiling and content delivery that can optimize campaigns based on current customer context and real-time locations.
• Deliver content on the preferred devices of customers and use real-time analytics to understand customer data such as preferred time and day for interactions.
Business intelligence and Big Data technology running on in-memory computing engines are making all of the above – and the personalization consumers expect – a reality today.
If you’re ready to become more customer-obsessed, take a look at the full Forrest report and learn more about using personalization to improve customer engagement.
